is true--and it is false. As an assurance to the
penitent and to the broken in heart, it is true, blessedly true; in any
other sense it is false as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us to
call "Father," He also called "Holy Father" and "Righteous Father." Have
we forgotten Peter's warning--we do not need to ask at whose lips he
learned it--"If ye call on Him as Father ... pass the time of your
sojourning in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine of
Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a modification of it;
rather is it an essential part of any true and complete statement of it.
Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be feared; that
is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God is a
Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows necessarily
on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, brethren, if we understood Peter and
Peter's Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more anxious
about our sins, because we have learnt to call God "Father." "Evil," it
has been well said, "is a more terrible thing to the family than to the
state."[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not,
and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss with light censure
he must search out to its depths. The judgment of a father--there is no
judgment like that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands
of the living God, for him who all his life through has set himself
against the Divine law and love, it is a still more fearful thing
because those hands are the hands of a Father.

But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the Fatherhood of
God. Let us go back to a chapter from which, though I have only once
quoted its words, we have never been far away--the fifteenth of St.
Luke, with its three-fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The
parables of the chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied
together in the light of the circumstances which were their common
origin. "The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man
receiveth sinners and eateth with them." These parables are Christ's
answer. Mark how He justifies Himself. He might have pleaded the need of
those whom the Pharisees and scribes had left alone in their
wretchedness and sin, but of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all
of the need of God. The central thought in each parable is not what man
loses by his sin, but what God loses. As the shepherd mis